Liu finds dead people still getting paid

From the Daily News:

Fourteen people collected city pensions from beyond the grave - pulling in more than $450,000 even though they were dead, officials charged Monday.

City Controller John Liu said relatives of the deceased apparently kept cashing their loved ones' checks - in some cases years after they had passed away.

The ghoulish acts netted $459,970.

Liu handed his report over to the city's Department of Investigation to determine if criminal charges will be filed.

In the most shocking of the 14 cases, someone cashed 38 pension checks worth $139,818 after the intended recipient died in 2007.

The scammer used the retiree's driver's license to bank the bogus pension payout. When the license expired this year, the scammer merely renewed it and continued "to cash the dead pensioner's checks," Liu said.

The identities of the fraudsters and their dead relatives were not revealed because the criminal probe was just beginning, officials said.

An additional 171 fishy cases, involving $2 million in taxpayer funds, are still undergoing scrutiny.

In those cases, the checks continued to be cashed for shorter periods and could have just been due to mistakes or bureaucratic lags that failed to quickly shut off electronic transfers.